"Lawrence Watt-Evans - Nightside City" - читать интересную книгу автора (Watt-Evans Lawrence)

Chapter One



THE CITY OUTSIDE MY WINDOW WAS A CACOPHONY OF neon and Stardust, a maze of
blinding glitter and flash, and from where I sat it was all meaningless, no
discrete images at all-nothing discrete, and certainly no discretion. I knew
that the casino ads were shimmying and singing like sirens, luring passersby
onto the rocks of the roulette wheels and randomizers, sucking them in with
erotic promises of riches, but all that reached me through the window was a
tangle of colored light and a distant hum, punctuated every so often by the
buzz and blink of a macroscopic floater passing nearby. Even the big ships
landing or lifting didn't bother me-the window was angled so I couldn't see
them unless they buzzed the Trap, which would have gotten any pilot's license
erased, and the port's big damper fields kept the noise out of the city.
As long as I kept the window transparent I always had the flicker and the
sparkle and the hum for a background, and the blaze of light and color was
there if I bothered to look, but I didn't have the noise and flash grinding in
on me.
I liked it that way. There was a time when I'd had an office in the Trap, as
we called it-the Tourist Trap-but that was a long time ago. When the case I'm
telling you about came up I had my little place in the burbs, on Juarez
Street, and I could see the lights of Trap Over all the more clearly for the
added distance. Instead of the overwhelming come-ons, the holos and the
shifting sculptures of Stardust, all I saw was just light and noise.
And was it ever really anything more?
Of course, I won't lie to you-I wasn't out in the burbs by choice, not really.
When I was young and stupid and new at my work I fell for a sob story while I
was on a casino job, and I let a welsher take an extra day. He was off-planet
within an hour, and IRC had to shell out the bucks to put an unscheduled,
shielded call through to Prometheus and nail him there. They weren't happy
with me, and when Interstellar Resorts Corporation isn't happy with you, you
don't work in the Trap. Even their competitors don't argue with that.
I'm just glad the bastard didn't have enough cash to buy his way out-system;
if IRC had had to chase him to Sol or Fomalhaut or somewhere, I'd have been
lucky to live a week.
Of course, if he'd had out-system fare he would have paid his tab in the first
place. It wasn't that big, which was another reason I'm still up and running.
When you can't work in the Trap, though, there isn't that much detective work
left on Epimetheus, short of security work in the mines. I wasn't ready to fry
my genes out there in some corner of nightside hell, making sure some poor
jerk who didn't know any better didn't pocket a few kilocredits' worth of hot
ore. Mine work might have had more of a future than anything in the city, but
it's not the sort of future I'd care to look forward to.
And I didn't know anything but detective work, and besides, I wasn't going to
give IRC the satisfaction of driving me out of business.
That left the burbs, from the Trap to the crater's rim, so that's where I
went. It's all still part of the city, really- everything inside the crater
wall is Nightside City, and anything outside in the wind, or off Epimetheus,
isn't, which keeps it simple. So I was still in the city, and I figured I